Trump to Defy Wisconsin Governor With Trip to Protest-Torn City
Trump to Defy Wisconsin Governor With Trip to Protest-Torn City
(Bloomberg) -- President Donald Trump will continue his effort to make unrest in U.S. cities a central issue in his re-election campaign with a trip Tuesday to Kenosha, Wisconsin, gripped by violence since the shooting of a Black man by police late last month.
Ahead of his visit, Trump escalated his blame of Democrats for nationwide protests and riots, warning voters on Monday it’s a preview of what’s to come if his opponent, Joe Biden, is elected to replace him.
But Biden had already begun to fire back at the president, reminding voters on Monday in his first campaign appearance since accepting the Democratic Party’s nomination, that the unrest has unfolded under Trump’s watch, and charging that he has failed to calm tensions and is encouraging violence for his political benefit.
The president is expected to meet Tuesday with local law enforcement officials and business owners in Kenosha whose property was damaged during demonstrations after a police officer last month repeatedly shot Jacob Blake, a 29-year-old Black man, in the back. Trump is making the trip against the wishes of Wisconsin’s Democratic governor, Tony Evers, who wrote him Sunday to warn he might inflame tensions in the city.
Trump said Monday he wouldn’t meet with Blake’s family on his visit, and that he had declined to take part in a telephone call because they requested that a lawyer participate. The president also announced Monday that the Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security would mount a joint operation to investigate “left wing” civil unrest in the U.S.
“The rioters and Joe Biden are both on the side of the radical left, and that is so obvious,” Trump said. “And until that neutralizes, you are never going to have safe areas in those Democrat-run areas.”
Biden said in a speech Monday in Pittsburgh that Trump was at fault for the unrest.
“This president long ago forfeited any moral leadership in this country. He can’t stop the violence -- because for years he has fomented it,”’ he said.
Last week, two people in Kenosha were shot and killed during protests, and Kyle Rittenhouse, an Illinois teenager who expressed support for Trump and police on social media has been charged with homicide in the the deaths. Over the weekend, right-wing demonstrators and Trump supporters drove a caravan of trucks into downtown Portland, Oregon, to confront police brutality protesters, shooting paint balls and chemical substances at them.
Aaron Danielson, a member of a local far-right group, was shot in the chest and killed in the fracas.
Trump defended the Portland caravan in a Monday news conference as “peaceful protesters” and said the use of paint ball guns was “defensive.” He condemned Danielson’s shooting, which remains under investigation. Moments later, he suggested Rittenhouse might have acted in self-defense.
“He was trying to get away from them, I guess, it looks like, and he fell and then they very violently attacked him and it was something that we’re looking at right now and it’s under investigation,” Trump said. “I guess he was in very big trouble, he probably would have been killed.”
That episode remains under investigation.
Trump made his “law and order” message a key element of last week’s Republican National Convention, and his campaign aides believe the political violence is fueling a rebound in his support and eroding Biden’s lead in polls. Biden holds a 6.9 percentage point lead nationally, according to an average of polls by RealClearPolitics, about three points down from his widest lead in late June.
In the Pittsburgh speech, Biden nodded to his reputation as a moderate, saying Trump’s efforts to align him with radicals were unfounded.
“You know me,” the longtime senator and two-term vice president said. “You know my heart, and you know my story, my family’s story. Ask yourself: Do I look to you like a radical socialist with a soft spot for rioters?”
He paused for effect and added, “Really?”
Evers wrote to Trump on Sunday to ask him to reconsider the Kenosha visit, expressing the worry that the president -- who has frequently criticized people protesting police brutality as rioters -- would exacerbate tensions.
“I am concerned your presence will only hinder our healing,” Evers wrote in a letter to Trump. “I am concerned your presence will only delay our work to overcome division and move forward together.”
Trump’s internal polls show that he is chipping away at Biden’s lead among female voters and those who live in the suburbs, including in Wisconsin, according to two officials who requested anonymity to discuss internal data. Campaign officials believe the protests are wearing thin on swing voters likely to decide the election, helping Trump’s “law and order” demand and his criticism of demonstrators to resonate.
Erin Decker, chair of Kenosha County Republicans, said that the local GOP office closed last Tuesday and only reopened on Monday. She says that it had been a “revolving door” all day.
“People are just supportive, so happy that he brought in the cavalry. They’re talking about the unrest and just very upset with Governor Evers and the lack of leadership from local leaders.”
People that came into the office Monday asked about details for Trump’s visit, where they could see him and “the route that he’s taking so they can stand along the road and hold up signs,” she said.
A Marquette Law School poll of likely voters in Wisconsin, conducted before Blake’s shooting, showed that support for the Black Lives Matter movement and the resulting protests had substantially declined. While 59% of Wisconsonites said they had a favorable view of Black Lives Matter in June, that number dropped to 49% in August.
“Biden is clearly rattled after a month of hiding in his basement and failing to stand up for the radical left wing mob,” Trump campaign spokesman Jason Miller told reporters on a conference call Monday.
White House officials dismissed Evers’s request.
“The president shows up,” White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany said Monday at a briefing for reporters, later adding: “The president wants to visit hurting Americans.”
Yet he has not visited Portland, which has experienced daily protests since the death of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, in the custody of Minneapolis police in May. Federal law enforcement personnel were deployed in the city last month to try to suppress the demonstrations, but Democratic state and city officials say the agents only heightened violence in the city’s streets and demanded they leave.
McEnany didn’t directly answer a reporter who asked whether Trump was visiting Kenosha because it is in a state more important to his re-election than Oregon. “This is another one in a long line of many states” he’s visited, she said.
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